Wall Street Journal had an article about some former Circuit City employees a few years ago. Turns out they were well paid and expected to know the products that they sold. Then came Best Buy with low paid employees and wiped the floor with CC. CC was forced to lay off all the highly paid ones and make a new system of low paid sales people. The reason is that people don't care about service, but only buy on price. That is why most independent electronics stores are out of business. You can't stay in business educating customers and having them buy somewhere else where it is cheaper. The ones that survived did so by selling the very high end stuff that the general retailers will never carry.

I saw a Best Buy employee smothering a baby with a pillow the other day.

THOSE MONESTERS!

LOL.

This thread makes baby jesus cry.

The great part about those clipboards is that their sole purpose is to mark down sales numbers in the particular section that the employee is working. How's that for irony?

Also, a new BB opened up at the Chandler Mall a few months ago, and after a handful of visits, I refuse to go in there. The store is always so slow that there are always too many Associates work, and all of whom insist on asking "is there is anything that I can help you find?" The firs 2 "no's" are fine, but beyond that, it get tedious. I like to think that i look like a determined shopper and rarely go to an electronics store to merely browse. I know where I am going and how to get there. Never thought I'd be complaining about too much customer service, but damn, they really do get annoying.

And to the person that bashed Blockbuster...I love movies and work there as a lowly CSR for the movies alone. Lord knows it's not for the pay. I will say this about Blockbuster and leave it at that: at the very least, BBV has a program in which employees can learn about the products they rent/sell...employees get free rentals in order to learn about the product and share that knowledge with the customer. Granted, that doesn't make up for the fact that the average IQ of a blockbuster employee is somewhere below 90, but for people like me, who relish in the free movies and games, we have the oppurtunity to share real reviews and opinions on our product.

Every time you bash Best Buy god kills a kitten?

I have had trouble with pick-up items as well, even after waiting 30 minutes in line just to get to the person who i'm supposed to pick it from.

In addition

I just recently had trouble returning an item there. They wanted a 15% restocking fee when nowhere on the receipt or on their big boards of polciies did it say my item applied. I also asked two employees, and the customer return rep before I bought it and they both said no restocking fee would apply for me. After being very rudely handled by the employee, the manager came and altough could not point it out where my item applied, decided that he would waive the fee for me.

Once i get my new phone, i'm going to record clips of the employees comments to me before i make purchases that i might return.

Here is my Best Buy story.

Went early this Sunday to get one of five laptops that each store has on sale. Was the first customer in the store. Went right to the computer counter and told the salesperson I want the laptop. He starts writing up my order.

I said to him, don't write up the order, go get the computer first and bring it to me, then write up the order, as there are only five per store, and I want to make sure I get one of them.

He assures me that it is not necessary, that one of them is mine.

Of course, he goes back to get it after he writes up the deal, and all five are now in the hands of other purchasers who came after me. There are none left.

Thankfully, he literally took one almost out of the hands of one of the subsequent purchasers, in order to give it to me.

Were I that customer, I would be really pissed.

I wonder if somewhere in those screens at Best Buy or any other retailer is a forum for employees to talk about the stupid customers who come in w/o receipts, or who didn't buy the service plan and now they want their out of warranty item fixed, or who have spent hundreds or thousands of millions of dollars at their store and if they don't get their way they will never shop there again!

And don't get them started about those idiots in the forums who bitch bitch bitch about not enough C.S., too much C.S., employees not being trained enough, etc., etc. :)


Tarantino? You worked there. There is such a place for employees, isn't there?

I currently work there. All my co-workers and I do are make fun of you guys ;)

You make fun of a customer that doesnt bother you and finds items all by himself?

Yup... sadly, for every idiot employee at a retail store there are probably ten idiot customers :)

I thought you quit during the recent shake-up. Cool to make fun of idiot customers but show love to PB when I'm in your store!

The place where retail employees make fun of "idiot" customers is the break room or their office if they work in a back office. :)

I know this is true.

I can somewhat tolerate an idiot customer and their dumb crap...they arent there all the time. Idiot employee's i cannot tolerate one bit because they work there and they will continue being idiots whenever they are there.

Dumb employee: 16 yr old kid was hired in the Media department. Couldnt tell you who any group was outside of his favorite group, NSYNC (he admitted this)

Best quote "Rod Stewart? Who is that?"

I really have to question why one would hire a person for the music department whose knowledge of music centers around boybands and nothing else.

Dumb customer: A lady came to me with some story about how a movie was coming out on this day (in that instance it was a Monday). Despite my efforts to explain that movies do not get released on Mondays she was 100% sure that it was coming out that day and that we were being mean to her and not selling it.

Also add the idiot kids singing karaoke worse than William Hung, the charming people who cranked the stereo volume all the way up on radios, or the wonderful people who needed to play every demo song on the keyboards full blast.


And no, retail employee's make fun of customers after they exit hearing distance.

Turnabout is fair play . . . most customers do deserve to be made fun of. I'll admit it, I've been in retail or customer service almost all of my working life.

Yeah same here, i dream of the day where i'm not working retail.

No crowded weekends, no stupid customers

And the day after thanksgiving and x-mas are just regular days.

Exactly.

Yep I agree, but its lacking big time for best buy/futureshop. I just can't beleive how consistantly bad the service is for most of their stores.

Labor, availability, part-time employees are cheaper than full-time......Take your pick. It works for Wal-Mart, Target, etc and having "knowledgeable" employees has not worked for Circuit City.

I understand the money issue but it makes the whole department look bad when one guy can't answer a simple question like "Where are "The Doors" located?"

People's opinions are based on who they talk to at the store, and talking to someone who doesnt know his ass from the Beatles doesnt say much.

Not necessarily . . . CC made many many other financial mistakes and took the corporate approach: cut labor.

Until corporations realize that their employees are actually an investment, not merely an expenditure, we will be doomed to never actually receive customer service.

Not to defend employess but why do people expect them to know almost 100% of items in their department? I'm sure nobody here would know almost 100% of the things in the department if they worked there. If you didn't normally listen to country would you know a singer is country (if he is a lesser known singer)? Probably not. You'd have to ask what type of singer he is. Would you want the customer to think you are a retard for not knowing? Didn't think so.

I bet customers think that any employee should know everything in the store. The video games are clost to the DVDs. I bet people looking for games often ask the DVD sales guy since he is close by. Should the DVD employees know the games and what system they go to?

Don't their in-store computers tell them what's in stock and what isn't in stock? If they don't - that's a pretty dumb way to run a store.

It tells us what's in stock and what's not, but that's not what he was saying. He was saying WHERE the product is.

I just received my copy of THE GOOD,THE BAD & THE UGLY two disc special edition from BestBuy.com.

When I opened the package, the feature film disc was missing--I had two "disc 2".

I immediately went to my nearest Best Buy store to exchange it.

The sales clerk was actually going to make me send the damn thing back instead of just exchanging it for the same item. She said she could not exchange it because it was shipped to my house and not to the store. Well, I said, if you were given the option of having something sent to your house for free as opposed to going to a store and picking it up, which would you choose?

I politely asked her to just exchange the item because I was not asking for a refund. She then "checked" with her supervisor on the phone, then came back and said she could open a new one and exchage it for the disc I was missing. Now there is a novel idea. Customer service at its "finest"!!